Matt J. Gumbley | Website: http://www.gumbley.me.uk
Blog: On The Edge of Occam's Razor


Clients Page
This page updated Fri Nov 4 13:44:05 2005

Table Of Contents


1 Introduction

 This project or information is dead. I cannot release any code or further information on it, other than what you'll find on this page. All communication regarding it will be silently deleted. Apologies.

This page presents overviews of the client applications being developed for PsiStack - the freeware TCP/IP stack for the Psion range of palmtop computers. Please see the PsiStack status report for information on the stack itself.

This software is being developed as an off-shoot of the Psion-Java project. For more information on this, visit our official home page, at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/9577/, maintained by Dan Ramage. Full release information will be found on Dan's pages; these pages are a public display of the work as it progresses.

It is hoped that authors of there applications will place their works under the GNU public license. However, it is really up to the individual author.

PsiStack will provide a BSD sockets interface to applications, through the use of a static (linkable) library, which talks to the stack on your application's behalf. See the PsiStack page for information on this. To develop applications for PsiStack, you will need to familiarise yourself with this model (and master Psion programming - a feat in itself!!) Since we're using this standard, and not inventing our own, it should be feasible to port UNIX TCP/IP applications to PsiStack, without much trouble (unless I really screw the sockets interface up!)

At the moment, we have a simple API providing BSD functionality, with asynchronous extensions in an EPOC stylee. The proper BSD layer will be written on top of this at a later date. There is currently no OPL interface - if you are conversant with IPC message passing in OPL, please get in touch.

If you would like to develop a PsiStack application, please subscribe to our mailing list, and I'll add your details to this page.

2 Client Software

2.1 Tools

 Tools such as ping and traceroute are being built into PsiStack, as they are essential to setting up the stack (and quite small). The stack also displays a subset of netstat information.

We need a finger client, a time (NTP) client... any more?

2.2 File transfer

We'll need an FTP client, and possibly a server. One option which may be very useful in our FTP client is a menu command which automates a backup of the user's Psion to any standard FTP server.

Darran Rimron has been looking at a SMB client (or was it a server?) to connect the Psion to Windows networks.

2.3 Telnet

One of the first clients to be developed will be a telnet client, which will be based on NFSC, using the sockets library to connect to PsiStack. This will be a separate product, split from the NFSC product.

Many thanks to Rudolf Koenig for allowing us to use NFSC as our base. Matt's working on this one. The bare bones are there, without any of the NFSC code. It doesn't connect yet, or pass any data. (TCP isn't finished yet).

Estimated timescale: This product was tentatively scheduled for Q1 1998. Revised timescale is now Q3 1998. Re-revised timescale is whenever it's ready.

2.4 E-Mail

Matt is writing an email client. Hopefully, it'll talk SMTP, POP3, and possibly IMAP4. It already handles standards UNIX mailbox files, and allows you to view them. No networking functionality yet, but there's quite a lot of User Interface done. The basic message composer is almost there, but you can't actually save your messages. The message you see is hard-coded.

2.5 Usenet News

 The idea of storing a news feed on my Psion makes me shiver somewhat, but plenty of people would like a news reader. Any takers?

2.6 IRC

 Plenty of people would like an IRC client. No, IRChat is NOT a TCP/IP application: it allows the users to send text messages between two Psions via the infra-red link. PsiStack allows this too. Any takers?

2.7 World Wide Web

 There are several off-line HTML readers for the Psion, and I've heard that when the relevant support is added, at least one of them will support PsiStack. Coupled with the Java Virtual Machine being developed by the Psion-Java team, this will give us our goal of Java Everywhere :)
(C) Matt J. Gumbley 1998-2005 - All Tights Reversed